Zero to Facebook faster than it takes me to make a sandwich, which is good enough for me.

I'd make sure it's booting to the right device. Make sure you only have one hard drive installed when you're installing Windows. Would also be worth checking the drive's SMART status for any signs of failure or pre-failure. For Windows, HD Tune should tell you. If you need something to boot up to, I recommend downloading and launching the Ultimate Boot CD, launching the PartedMagic OS and checking the smart status with GSmartControl (should be on the desktop). Even if SMART comes back okay, run a short drive self-test (another SMART feature).

Many thanks, yes it's booting from the HD and without any USB attached at the moment (except the USB install of course but I select the HD from BIOS boot), SMART passed (I will check the self-test tomorrow as now I will go to bed lol.)

I am using Hirens (Will try UBC too, thanks!) using a LiveCD XP and a partition manager there which I don't remember now, deleted everything and created the partition on the XP setup.

But I can't go to the Graphic part of the setup. Due to the above error!

I could be wrong but maybe you need to install usb drivers before xp can continue to install. I am almost sure i had to do this years ago for usb2 at least.

OR does it not start the install at all from the usb stick?

Click to expand...

Yes the setup acts fine during the first part (the text mode part) but I cannot go on into the second part (the graphic one) because I get theWindows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem Could not read from the selected boot disk check boot path and disk hardware
After rebooting past the copying files thing. Also this same USB setup worked fine on other computers except my netbook!

Solved it modifying BOOT.INI to multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1) from multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(2)partition(2) I don't know why the fuck the installer made a wrong BOOT.INI everytime. WinXP is now up and running on the nebtook.